Posted
by
timothyon Monday August 07, 2006 @04:22PM
from the 300-shakin'-megs dept.

Donnie D writes "Video of id Software's John Carmack is available from his address to QuakeCon 2006 last week. It was comparable to his down to earth speech presented last year when he focused on next generation console gaming. This year, he focused on multi-processor support in games. Mentioned in his address are interesting details such as NVIDIA's sponsorship of Armadillo Aerospace for the X-Prize competition, vague details on id's next game, and topics related to his cell phone games. The video includes 1 hour and 20 minutes of Carmack's address."

As a computer scientist that works on large scale parallel code... I found his comments about parallelism to be spot on. I don't think most people understand just how difficult it is to write parallel code... especially for things running in real time.

It sounds to me like the PS3 is going to be a bitch to write for... the "acceleration engine" philosophy is just too far out there. From what Carmack was saying it seems that Microsoft went in the right direction with 3 identical cores. This gives some amount of parallelism while not being over the top... allowing for a smoother transition from the serial code that most programmers are used to writing. We'll see how this plays out in the market next year.

I was somewhat dissapointed by his statements about the Wii... basically he just doesn't like Nintendo (because of a prior falling out)... so we probably won't be seing id software games on the Wii anytime soon (which is a bummer... because I know Carmack could do some awesome stuff with the motion sensing technology).

Finally... I will say that I got to play with some of the cell-phone games that Carmack created... and man they were really cool. Specifically Doom RPG looked really good and played well. They are the first cell-phone games that have ever made me really want to do something on my phone besides use it to talk. He talked about possibly porting them to the Nintendo DS (probably through a third party) which sounds like a great idea.